I
guess it’s about time. The cycle of pop-culture nostalgia
seems to run roughly seven or eight years behind the decade
it’s fetishizing—you might recall that 1998 was the year of
Orgy’s “Blue Monday,” and a surplus of ’80s package tours
crowding the sheds. (That Culture Club-Human League-Howard
Jones bill must have been one to remember.)

Now, with the ’90s nostalgia wagon charging ahead at full
steam, the bands of not-so-yesteryear are taking to the road
at a record pace. Everyone from the Smashing Pumpkins to Portishead
have gotten back into the business, and the inevitable trickle-down
effect has now influenced such one-hit wonders as Superdrag
(good), the Mighty Mighty Bosstones (meh) and Deep Blue Something
(dear God, no) to put in for vacation time from the hardware
store, take the van off blocks and head out for another round
of shows.

Herein lies the problem: The wrong bands are representing
a decade that was much better, music-wise, than it seemed
(despite the seeming omnipresence of Everclear between 1995
and 2000). Where’s Elastica when we need them? Or Sugar? I
could do with Lotion, Failure, Rocket From the Crypt, Shudder
to Think, Jawbox or -breaker . . . just about anyone
signed to DGC between 1994 and 1997. It makes me pine for
the should-have-beens, for all the hours spent rooting through
cutout bins at Rhino Records and the Music Shack, and for
a few lost bands and albums that could have been big. Bigger
than Filter, even.

Social
Kill, the 1994 full-length from California band the Ex-Idols,
is one of the most visceral releases of its time. Released
at roughly the same time as Green Day’s Dookie and
the Offspring’s Smash, Social Kill could (and
should) have capitalized on the pop-punk revival of 1994—had
it only been a little more pop and a little less punk. But
that’s what gives the Ex-Idols their edge: These songs are
dark, desperate, dirty and debauched, coupling the manufactured
danger of Sunset Strip bands like Mötley Crüe with the very
real danger of nascent (circa-’70) Iggy and the Stooges. Gary
Finneran’s voice rattles like an empty gasoline can—something
like a young Iggy Pop, actually—as he fires off curse-filled
self-hate anthems one after another (sample lyric: “Everybody’s
laughing/Everybody dies/Being alive is suicide”), his every
word a dagger for the eardrum. The band matches Finneran’s
intensity, bringing in the 14-track album at a ferocious 36
minutes. The band were dropped before they were able to cut
a second album and quickly split; a brief 1998 reunion drew
little fanfare, but quite fortunately, latecomers can download
the band’s entire catalog (two albums and an EP) at Ex-Idols.com.

The Grays could have been contenders, had 1994 been
the year of smartly composed pop-rock. (See above.) They had
a pedigree to die for, although it was still being built at
the time: Drummer Dan McCarroll and guitarist Buddy Judge
worked with Aimee Mann on her first solo release; Jason Falkner,
who had recently left retro-pop act Jellyfish, went on to
release a few drastically underheard solo releases; Jon Brion
later scored several Hollywood films, made a record of his
own (1999’s label-spurned Meaningless), and produced
albums for just about everyone. Much like their spiritual
forebears Badfinger (although not nearly as ill-fated), the
band sported three strong singer-songwriters in Brion, Falkner
and Judge. That democracy, not to mention the seemingly bottomless
multi-instrumental talents of Falkner and Brion, make Ro
Sham Bo, the band’s one and only release, a fully satisfying
hour of baroque power pop. The group’s only brush with mainstream
success came when the video for the
Falkner-penned single “Very Best Years” was panned by Beavis
and Butthead, and copies of the long-out-of-print Ro Sham
Bo are increasingly hard to come by.

I never really expected that the Interpreters would
make a break for the big time, as the mod-fired power-pop
that the youthful Philly-based trio served up on 1997’s Back
in the U.S.S.A. was flatly incongruous with its time.
(Again: Everclear. What were we thinking?) Released by Warner
imprint Freeworld after being batted around by several labels,
U.S.S.A. is an absolute blast. The drums surge forth
in Keith Moon-like spasms, the guitar and bass unite in righteous
one-note riffery, and Herschel Gael’s vocals are masterfully
snotty. The album has more whoa-oh-ohs and hey-heys than I
can count. All but three of the album’s 16 tracks come in
under three minutes in length; five of them don’t even break
the two-minute mark. It’s a shitload of fun; it just came
at a time when people weren’t interested in their music being
fun. The band continued as the Interpreters USSA for a few
years (including a performance at the 2000 Republican National
Convention!?!) before calling it quits; their sound later
thrived in the hands of the Hives.

Speaking
of bad timing, the Unband rocked hard when hard rock
wasn’t cool. A few years later and the Unband might have latched
onto the garage revival, but in the year 2000, the public
couldn’t get enough of that shitty nü-metal. Retarder
is not that. It is shitty, but in the best possible way—it
should go without saying that the album lives up to its name.
Besides having one of the greatest titles in the history of
titles, Retarder is an all-out bar-brawl of an album,
one of the best big-dumb-rock records I’ve ever heard. The
song titles do all the work, really: “(You Make Me) Rock Hard,”
“(Sure Do Feel Like a) Piece of Shit,” “Crack Soundtrack,”
“Everybody Wants You,” “Cocaine Whore,” “$#@?!!” (Yes, that
was a Billy Squier cover back there.) Though a few of their
tracks were featured in the film Super Troopers,
a 2000 tour opening for Def Leppard was probably the band’s
closest brush with fame, and it inspired bassist Michael Ruffino
to pen one of the most laugh-out-loud tour diaries I’ve ever
read. Copies of Retarder are typically easy to find
on the Internet, and you should own it. Ruffino later stretched
his writings into a book, and that’s supposedly being turned
into a film. Be afraid.